AUTOMATONS - AUTOMATONS - AUTOMATONS -- What are they' What are Jack Black, Stallone, Cleese and Macy doing w/ it'

Every now and again there’s a secret geek paradise project in the works… Something, not on anybody’s RADAR… flying in low, but unbelievably kooky and cool. Today – I get to unveil one such project for y’all.

I’ve known about this thing for about 4 or 5 years now, the first time I heard about it was in the midst of an amazing first conversation with Ed Solomon at the OMNI Hotel’s Bar Area. At the time, Ed was at an interesting place… he’d spent years doing rewrite and for hire gigs. He’d made a fortune off of his work on BILL & TED and MEN IN BLACK. But he was feeling like he was kinda losing track of who he was… He expressed that he felt he had just been doing “other people’s things” for a bit too long. He told me, that he had gotten back together with Chris Matheson (his co-writer/co-creator of the BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE universe) and they were revisiting a script they had begun back in those days… A script they called… AUTOMATONS.

I have to admit… When he mentioned that the script was for something he wanted to do Stop-Motion, that it of course had to do with Robots… and that it was ingeniously insane… well, I got excited. I love Stop-Motion in film. It’s like a hard-wired feeling of cool. Also – because it is such an unwieldy medium, I find that usually the people committed to working in it, have a more disciplined dedication to the work, the story and the craft. When you’re literally controlling every second of the frame… you have to know where you’ve been and where you’re going… and as a result, I feel that is what is so incredibly lovely about films like KING KONG or MIGHTY JOE YOUNG or JASON & THE ARGONAUTS…. And then in modern day works like CHICKEN RUN, JAMES & THE GIANT PEACH and the “mac daddy” of the Genre… THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

Last year, Ed Solomon came to Austin to screen LEVITY at the Alamo Drafthouse and afterwards, we (Father Geek & I) went over to his hotel and we had a great night where he began to show me some of the early work that Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh were doing for him (Check out Screen-Novelties.Com to see some of their past work!). Specifically – the early Otto and Rob designs, and I fell in love. This wasn’t really a shock… I first went ‘gaga’ for Caballero and Walsh’s work on a short they made called OLD MAN AND THE GOBLINS. It was part of an ATLANTA FILM & VIDEO FESTIVAL that I judged back in like 2000 or 2001, I can’t remember. And I met Mark outside, I believe the Arclight, when I was filming live interviews for the Pilot for my long languishing genius of a Television Show back years ago. Now, most of you probably know their work from them helping Ray Harryhausen to finish TORTOISE AND THE HARE… and some of their work on Cartoon Network – like that groovy Fred Flintstone stopmotion sequence they did. Wait… I realized… you people have no idea what AUTOMATONS is!

Well, let me rectify that situation pronto…

AUTOMATONS is… simply one of the coolest projects around right now. You see, back towards the end of World War 2, the good ol U.S. of A. was taxing their best noodles to fry up a notion that would put an end to the war pronto. Most of us are familiar with THE PHILIDELPHIA EXPERIMENT, that super serum that resulted in Steve Rogers remarkable physique and those ludicrous H-Bomb plans, which just led to giant fire-breathing monsters that apparently plague Japan to this day… But what none of us were aware of… what was never freed from the vaults of history, were the two indestructible infinitely powerful automatons created with the singular purpose of killing Adolph Hitler. Invincible, unstoppable robotic assassins… the only glitch they had was that they thought they were human and that we were robots… but hey, this was pre-WINDOWS – so while it may have a major programming glitch… they were built to last.

Unfortunately – as they were placed into their 2 man sub with the mission to go kill Hitler… word came back that the Chaplin copycat had off’d himself in a bunker somewhere, and suddenly it was decided to just let their sub sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, since they no longer had a sense of purpose. For about 60 years, these two robots were wandering around the ocean floor trying to find Hitler and arguing amongst themselves… various barnacles and crud attached themselves to Otto Maton and Rob Ott, but finally they came out onto dry land, much to the chagrin to the secretive U.S. govt.

Meanwhile… Unknown to the rest of the world, Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini come out of their Top Secret Cryo-chamber… and decide that they really were out of line with that whole rule the world thing, so Adolph decides to put on the greatest play version of YOU’RE A GOOD MAN CHARLIE BROWN, but due to rights issues… well, they gotta do a knock off version.

Suffice to say… the world doesn’t entirely love either the Automatons or Hitler’s stage passions… A quick journey to the center of the earth and a trip to the moon later we have the conclusion to one of the greatest works of absurdist genius the world has yet to see. Quirky doesn’t quite cover it… Zany, maybe… but what it most definitely is… is one unique crazed hilarious script. Just a beautifully rambunctious laff riot. Something, I dearly hope makes it all the way to the screen.

So, speaking of, where’s it at?

Well, using all dat Movie Moolah that Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson have been putting in shoeboxes under the porn collections in their mutual attics, they’ve managed to shoot some tests with Caballero and Walsh! They’ve also recorded all the dialogue for the movie… literally all the dialogue is in the can! Who does it all?

Get a load of this:

Otto Maton: Jack Black

Rob Ott: John C Reilly

Those are the lead characters.

Then you have:

Billy Bob Thornton as “The Holy Earth Father” and Catherine O’Hara as “Celeste Eelbody and Fred Armisen as Tojo.

William H Macy and Holly Hunter have also recorded their parts (secret for now)

But the genius of the voice casting… the part that’ll make every last single one of us scream in mortal agony till we can see this on a silver screen…

HITLER is voiced by JOHN CLEESE!!!!!

Ok… after you cease hyperventlelating – read this:

MUSSOLINI has been voiced by SYLVESTER STALLONE!!!

Now – I’m not sure exactly who I have to kill to see that this movie gets made. But John Cleese voicing an artistically fragile Hitler harboring both war-mongering urges and a desire to be loved… it’ll kill people, they’ll laugh so hard. And Stallone doing Mussolini – it’s like the most perfectly hilarious thing ever.

Now – Quite a bit of this has been designed by Bo Welch, and it looks great! Ed showed me some of it the other day, and just looking at Hitler in the driveway of his pink split level suburban American home looking lost in his swastika covered pj’s… well, imagining Cleese’s voice coming out of that character just tickles me in all the right ways.

Or – the themepark that the moonpeople that believe they’re Earthlings have constructed out of old abandoned U.S. and Soviet Space Junk left there… it’s classic!

It’s projects like these that give one hope… Hope that everything is stamped in round cookie shapes and shipped in plastic sealed bags with brand names attached. That sometimes, there’s people out there that know exactly how far one has to go to get laughs that kill… I know it seems like I might’ve spoilt a great deal of the movie, but I promise you… all of this, this is nothing. This film is going to make you weep in laughter… with that talent, that script, Caballero & Walsh… all this needs is a distributor so we can see it sooner rather than later.